Travel planning generally involves first determining a mode of transportation, and then finding an ideal route from the origin to the destination. Travel planning, however, could be a complicated and, at times, a cumbersome process involving a lot of inefficiencies. For instance, some of the complications and issues that make travel planning cumbersome include travelers often having many alternatives for routes, which are often highly incomplete and include difficult to obtain route information. Some of the reasons for this difficulty include the multitude of travel providers, inhomogeneous data formats for schedule information, loss of time from route congestion or intermodal transfers, pricing schemes and taxation among many others. Even when information on alternatives is accessible to users, only a limited subset of alternatives are perceived and even fewer alternatives are actually considered. This often leads to choosing sub-optimal routes for the user. In addition, current travel planning does not allow taking full advantage of transport capacities, resulting in significant transportation overheads.
Today, travelers often use travel websites as their first source of information about different travel services. Travel websites also offer travelers travel planning services based on their preferences. Travel websites generally require travelers to provide two discrete criteria: (1) a pair of travel terminals, which include airports, rail stations or bus stations; and (2) a date and time preference for departure from the origin terminal. Depending on the type of travel service provided by the travel website, the travelers are then provided feasible travel options between the origin and the destination using the travel routes serviced by the travel service.
In an illustrative example, when a traveler wishes to fly from San Francisco to New York, the traveler chooses one of the number of airports available in and around San Francisco as the origin terminal and one of the number of airports available in and around New York as the destination terminal. The air travel website, depending on the date and time of travel, provides all the possible flight combinations between the origin terminal and the destination terminal that meets the travelers' criteria, allowing the travelers to pick the flight combination that best suits their needs. Such travel planning, however, involves only one type of travel service. Further, any additional service provided by the travel websites pertaining to other modes of travel, such as by cars, are limited to cross-selling of car rentals for travel after arriving at the destination terminal. Additionally, the travel by car is not integrated into the travel planning as part of the complete origin to destination travel.
However, few travelers actually start or end their journeys at travel terminals. Most travel by private car, taxi, public transportation or foot from a starting address (a home, office, hotel, or other landmark) to the origin terminal (defined as a rail, bus or airport terminal) where they transfer onto pre-scheduled services, such as air travel. When the travelers finally arrive at the destination terminal, they transfer back to on-demand travel services, such as private car, taxi, public transportation, or foot to continue traveling to their final destination address.
Additionally, the travel planning provided by travel websites lack basic information components travelers may need to plan their trip. First, a traveler needs to know by what time she needs to leave from her starting address, and whether that starting time is compatible with the rest of her travel schedule. For example, a business traveler may only be able to leave her office after her meeting ends at 4 pm. So, any travel option that requires a 3 pm departure will not be viable. Further, a traveler needs to know whether the itinerary leaves sufficient time (as defined by the traveler) for baggage check, security, and for connections between transport modes (connecting flights, etc.). Additionally, a traveler needs to know by what time she will arrive at her final address, and whether that time is compatible with the rest of her schedule. For example, travelers may seek travel options that arrive after hotel check-in times begin. The current travel planning provided by travel websites do not provide any of this information.
For example, consider a traveler planning a journey from the Westin Hotel in Tysons Corner, Va. to the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, Calif. The length of the journey requires travel by air. Also, the traveler cannot leave before a breakfast meeting that terminates at 10 am, but must arrive at the Bonaventure Hotel in time for a 5 pm meeting. The traveler is not familiar with the possible departure or arrival airports.
In order to determine the possible airports, the traveler looks up the addresses for each point. Based on a maximum driving distance of 50 miles, the traveler determines that the airports IAD, DCA and BWI are viable origin terminals, and that the airports LAX, BUR and SNA are viable destination terminals. The traveler will then visit airline or travel agency websites to assess the possible flight combinations between the origin terminals (IAD, DCA and BWI) and the destination terminals (LAX, BUR and SNA).
An illustrative sample schedule display, as shown in FIG. 10, could appear in one of the travel websites, say for example united.com. It provides a given date, origin terminal (IAD), destination terminal (LAX), airline and flight number, and fare quote. However, it does not provide any information about what time the user must leave his starting address, or can expect to arrive at the final address.
The schedule display, as shown in FIG. 10, has not provided the user with guidance about travel time from the Westin to IAD and what time he should leave, or what time he should expect to arrive at the Bonaventure Hotel. It has not disclosed that an efficient one-stop itinerary from close by Washington Reagan (DCA) to Burbank (BUR) involves a faster overall travel time from starting to final address than the nonstop IAD-LAX trip shown above. The traveler would have to aggregate the travel time for each travel option along different travel segments to determine the travel option that best meets her needs.
Among teaching a variety of other things, certain aspects of the inventions herein have embodiments which may satisfy one or more of the above described issues.